Latin America and Policy Diffusion

From Import to Export

Osmany Porto de Oliveira, Cecilia Osorio Gonnet, Sergio Montero, Cristiane Kerches da Silva Leite, Osmany Porto de Oliveira, Cecilia Osorio Gonnet, Sergio Montero, Cristiane Kerches da Silva Leite

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2019
• ISBN:
  9780429820786
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Politica e relazioni internazionali
• Subtopic: Politica

Latin American countries have for a long time been importers of public policies and institutions from the Global North. The colonial legacy and resulting patterns of international relations during the 20th century favoured a course of adoption and hybridization of political institutions. In recent decades, a new conjuncture has emerged in which Latin American policies have started to diffuse South-South and even South-North.

Led by Brazil with Participatory Budgeting and the Bolsa Familia program, other countries in the region soon followed. The Bus Rapid Transit (BRT) system and bicycle policies in Curitiba and Bogotá have also reached wide international recognition and circulation. And yet, despite Latin America's new role as a policy "exporter", little is known about its dynamics, causes, and effects. Why have Latin American policies been diffused inside and outside the region? Which actors are involved? What driving forces affect these processes? This innovative collection offers a new perspective on the policy diffusion phenomena. Drawing on different examples from Latin American experiences in urban local policies and national social policies, experts present a new framework to study this phenomenon centered on the mobilization of ideas, interests and discourses for policy diffusion.

Latin America and Policy Diffusion will be of great interest to researchers, educators, advanced students and practitioners working in the fields of political science, public policy, international relations and Latin American Studies.

1
Introduction

Latin American Public Policies: From Import to Export

Osmany Porto de Oliveira, Cecilia Osorio Gonnet, Sergio Montero, and Cristiane Kerches da Silva Leite

Introduction

The movement of political models, public policies and institutions is not a recent phenomenon. Policies traveling from one place to another are intrinsically intertwined with the evolution of political institutions. Southern countries have historically adopted models from the North, owing to different reasons such as colonial legacy, economic dependency on other countries, the circulation of elites, global political trends fostered by Europe and the United States, imposition by international institutions and so on. In the case of Latin America, colonial legacies from Spain and Portugal shaped political institutions in the early stages of nation-state building in the 18th and 19th centuries. During the 19th century, European countries such as France were an important source of influence. For example, the separation of powers, a principle that was born in France from the 1789 Revolution, was included in the first Brazilian Constitution in 1824. Later, during the 20th century, the United States expanded into the South and became one of the major influences in the region. In the late 1980s, the so-called Washington Consensus, a set of neoliberal state reforms and their associated policies, were imposed in Latin America via conditionality mechanisms through the Bretton Woods Institutions, in particular the World Bank and the International Monetary Fund.

The case of Latin American policy import is also similar to other countries in the Global South, which follows a North-to-South policy adoption dynamic. However, in recent decades, a new conjuncture has emerged in Latin America that has favored a reversal of exclusively “policy import” processes, enabling a “policy export” movement to emerge. After many Latin American countries went through a period of dictatorship, the democratization that has been taking place since the 1980s and 1990s meant rebuilding and creating new institutions, norms and public policies. National and subnational governments in the region had to cope with long-standing social problems, such as persistent poverty, in a new political context characterized by parallel processes of neoliberalization and democratization of the state, and a lack of resources and state capacity.

Despite the challenges of the time, this new political context opened the door to policy innovation and fresh ideas introduced by social movements, civil society associations and new political parties. From the late 1980s until the early 2000s, Latin America became a laboratory for public policies, in particular social policy. As Arocena and Bowman (2014, p. xvii) state, there are different public policy fields where Latin America was an innovator, for example “in [the] demilitarization in Costa Rica and Panama, in social security reform in Chile, in multicultural policies for Indigenous peoples in Bolivia, in quotas to increase women’s representation in Argentine Congress, and in equity programs to transfer resources to the poor in Brazil.”

In the experience of Latin America, which is the main focus of this book, Brazil is an emblematic case of this movement from policy import to export. Yet, we do acknowledge—and describe in the next section—that policy diffusion processes are much more complex phenomena than “exporting” practices (Porto de Oliveira and Pimenta de Faria, 2017). Until recent years, little was known about Latin American social policy export in the literature on policy diffusion and transfer. Mainstream studies on policy transfer, diffusion and circulation were focused on understanding the adoption of US policies in the UK (Dolowitz and Marsh, 2000, p. 6), the influence of US policies in Canada (Howlett, 2000), the Europeanization process (Saurugger and Surel, 2006), how OECD was globalizing policy standards (Pal, 2012), the adoption of liberal markets (Simmons, Dobbin and Garrett, 2008) and the emulation of Western institutions by African countries (Badie, 1992), to name a few. Another strand of literature was concerned with questions such as understanding actors, mostly governmental and non-governmental (national and international) actors, who are engaged in transfers, their objects, the directions of the movement (Dolowitz and Marsh, 2000; Rose, 1991; Stone, 2001), as well as mechanisms driving diffusion processes such as coercion, competition, learning and socialization (Graham, Shipan and Volden, 2013).

This book offers a new path to engage in the debate of the international “travels” of public policies. The cases of study included in this book bring new questions, methods and empirical material to analyze a phenomenon that was previously overlooked by the mainstream literature: Latin America as an exporter of policies. The Brazilian case leads our reflection, which is complemented by Chilean and Colombian examples, as well as comparative perspectives with Mexico and other Latin American countries. The contributions of this book highlight different issues of the policy diffusion debate, such as the diverse strategies for policy export set forth by Latin American countries, bottom-up diffusion and the role of ideas and new power dynamics between Latin American governments and international institutions.

In this book, we also leave behind disciplinary battles that foster divisions among experts. We incorporate different perspectives in this book that help us understand international policy diffusion from a multidimensional perspective, building bridges among scholars with different backgrounds. This introduction will present the debate of the field in its first section. The following section will advance the argument of Latin American countries as “policy exporters.” The fourth section frames the theoretical contributions of the book, and the fifth and final section discusses the overall methodology used in the book, before moving to the conclusion and next steps.

A Pluralistic View of Traveling Policies

Different approaches have been developed to understand the international movement of public policies, enabling the production of analytical frameworks, identifying mechanisms, scales of observation and so on. For example, the term “diffusion” is used in particular by US scholars (Simmons, Dobbin and Garrett, 2008), while “transfer” emerged in the British debate (Evans, 2009). The concept of “circulation” is present in the French sociology of public action works, and the “mobilities” proposal was advanced by urban geographers (Peck and Theodore, 2010). These approaches are not always in harmony. In fact, ontological and epistemological conflicts have arisen between intellectual streams, regarding topics such as how policies move transnationally, which objects circulate, which agents participate, the role of culture and contexts and more, bringing not only divisions to the field, but also intense debate.¹

This book aspires to move beyond disciplinary divisions and perspectives oriented by research traditions. We believe that there are many overlapping and complementary issues, questions and approaches produced by recent literature. We don’t take a position against a specific trend—for example, Peck and Theodore (2015), whose approach is in opposition with policy transfers—but instead our intent is to build bridges to improve our understanding of the phenomena in a pluralistic and interdisciplinary perspective. We understand that there are different lenses and scales in the analysis of transnational policy movement, and for this reason, rather than choosing between “diffusion,” “transfer,” “circulation” or “mobilities,” we use each term for different aspects of the discussion. In that sense, we follow Porto de Oliveira and Pimenta de Faria’s (2017, p. 30) approach, that advocates for the use of the term “’transfer” in reference to a specific displacement of a policy from one jurisdiction to another, “diffusion” for a collective adoption of a public policy and “circulation” as a longer and wider flow, in time and space, that can also imply back and forward policy “movements.” In the next sections, we will present different traditions of analysis that seek to explain how policies travel.

Policy Transfer

Within the Anglo-Saxon perspective, policy transfer studies started to gain space in the field of public policy analysis in the 1990s. Authors like Richard Rose, who created the notion of “lesson-drawing,” wrote pioneering works seeking to understand the specific processes of displacement of policies or programs (past and present) from one government to another. Unlike the studies of policy diffusion, which focus on broader and more fluid processes, the studies on policy transfer are interested in understanding how paradigms, lesson drawings, institutional arrangements and instruments (and other elements) of a public policy (or a specific program) transition into another context.

Policy transfer studies brought the idea that public policies are implemented through a combination of administrative techniques that often originate elsewhere. Rose (1991) stated that policies and programs invariably suffer transformations inside different contexts, creating new meanings and often provoking unexpected changes in an idiosyncratic process of adaptation, which can lead to copies, emulation, hybrids, syntheses and simple inspirations. This perspective was advanced by Dolowitz and Marsh (2000), who brought contemporary elements from the public policy analysis agenda into the field of policy transfer studies. According to the authors, it is necessary to map the relevant social and political actors who define what is transferred, for which reasons, where they originate and what are the effects of the process. Dolowitz and Marsh (2000) were not only the first cartographers of the field, as Hadjiisky, Pal and Walker (2017) state, but they also produced a framework of analysis, which helped orient research in the beginning of the 2000s.

Considering the great number of power imbalances and conflicts between the administrative and political levels (nationally and internationally), it became important to understand the political meaning of the policy instruments that are mobilized, the various directions of the transfers and the nature of the policy learning process (Porto de Oliveira and Pimenta de Faria, 2017). The role of transfer agents was explored in depth by Diane Stone (2001), who suggests that the policy transfer process mobilizes a network of actors that must be studied beyond the relationship between governments. The variety of the actors who interact within the political systems of contemporary capitalist and democratic countries demands the study of interaction patterns between governmental, non-governmental, private corporations and think tanks, both nationally and internationally.

Most recent works identified forces that facilitate and constrain the transfer process (Hadjiisky, Pal and Walker, 2017). If the area has advanced in different fronts of research, there are still frontiers to be surpassed. As Porto de Oliveira and Pal (2018) found, the field still needs to explore and better understand the role of private actors, the internationalization of domestic coalitions, the dynamics of resistance towards policy transfer, translation, arenas of transfer and new directions of Southern transfer.

Policy Diffusion

One of the definitions about diffusion was proposed by David Strang and Sarah Soule (1998, p. 266), who used the term “to denote flow or movement from a source to an adopter, paradigmatically via communication and influence.” Rogers states that diffusion “is the process through which an innovation is spread through certain communication channels in time between the members of a society” (2004, p. 14). Another similar definition was presented by Levi-Faur, who defines diffusion as “the process by which the adoption of innovation by member(s) of a social system is communicated through certain channels over time, and activates the mechanisms that increase the probability of adoption by other members that haven’t adopted yet” (Levi-Faur, 2005, p. 23). This statement is later enriched by Jordana, Levi-Faur and Fernandez and Marin (2009), presenting diffusion “as the process whereby information on the creation of new institutions is communicated through certain channels over time among the members of a social system in an uncoordinated manner, and prior adoptions of an innovation affect the probability of adoption for some of the remaining non-adopters in the population” (Jordana, Levi-Faur, Fernandez and Marin, 2009, p. 7).

These definitions highlight diverse aspects of the process, but all of them agree that a process of diffusion means that during the adoption of a policy, the policy be influenced by the previous decisions of others, at any point during the adoption process. “The policy options in a country affect the political options of other countries, because of what causes the convergence policies” (Meseguer and Gilardi, 2009, p. 528). This perspective assumes the complete independence of the actors, but it also seems unlikely that convergence will occur exclusively due to coordination among actors, through international cooperation processes or due to pressures from more powerful agents. In other words, diffusion poses that there is interdependence between countries over time, or with a central actor who acts as a transmitter. Countries would neither act in a completely independent manner, nor in a coordinated manner. The diffusion process answers to an uncoordinated interdependence (Elkins and Simmons, 2005, p. 35). “Under this conception, governments are independent in the sense that they make their own decisions without cooperation or coercion but interdependent in the sense that they factor in the choices of other governments” (Elkins and Simmons, 2005, p. 35).

Some of the characteristics of the adoption process that help distinguish it from other phenomena are the following: first, diffusion occurs in waves, starting slowly with the number of actors adopting the initiative, increasing significantly and then decreasing. This implies that, in graphic terms, the adoption rate over time will form an “S” curve (Meseguer and Gilardi, 2009). Second, diffusion usually presents a significant geographic convergence (Weyland, 2007) in the same area or among neighboring countries, states or municipalities. Finally, it is possible to identify similarities not only between the central characteristics of the policies diffused, but with divergence in other secondary components (Wey-land, 2007). Therefore, it is possible to identify which object was disseminated through the wave of diffusion. Finally, many authors have also reached a consensus that there are four mechanisms operating in policy diffusion: coercion, emulation, construction and competition (Graham, Shipan and Volden, 2013).

Policy Circulation

Studies dating from the 1980s were already discussing policy diffusion in French political science, using terms such as “institutional transfer.” In 1988, Badie published a pioneering work on the Arab adoption of Western institutions...